In any setting where noise is generated, furniture can tend to increase and distort the noise by reflecting sound waves around the room. Solutions to this problem have been developed for various settings. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,212,355 discloses a filing cabinet having sound absorptive properties. The filing cabinet has a door having metal front and rear panels with an intermediate layer of sound absorbing material in between. According to the specification, the door absorbs sound generated in the workplace, such as employee conversations, telephones, typewriters and other office equipment to create a more pleasant work environment. In another example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,325,597 discloses a furniture system that can be provided with sound-absorbent fabric layers and can also be used to improve the acoustics of an office. While these disclosures may be effective in reducing the noise generated in an office, they are not designed to enhance the acoustical performance of rehearsal rooms used for music rehearsal or performance.
Thus, there is a need for sound absorbing furniture used in music rooms, such as cabinets for storing musical instruments. Instrument storage cabinets are a necessity in all school music programs. Due to space constraints, however, many music programs only have space for their instrument storage in the rehearsal room. The acoustical impact of placing instrument storage cabinets in rehearsal rooms, though, can be significant.
A rehearsal room should provide an acoustic environment where the room acoustics neither enhance nor detract from the acoustic properties of the instruments but still provide a sense of support or ensemble to the musicians due to the time delay of the reflected sound energy (preferably in the range of 50-80 msec). Where storage cabinets are required to be kept in the rehearsal room, they decrease the cubic volume of the room and also tend to create specular reflections, which hamper the acoustic performance of the room. In addition, prolonged exposure to the sound generated in such rooms and reflected by prior art storage cabinets can lead to hearing loss.
In order to lessen their acoustical impact, musical instrument storage cabinets can be provided with a grill (as opposed to solid) door. Typically, there is a plurality of grill doors separably openable to provide individual access to each storage space in the cabinet. Each grill door is often comprised of a plurality of vertical bars and a single horizontal bar. Such grill doors increase sound diffusion by allowing the sound to pass into the cabinet, where it is scattered before it is reflected back out. However, the vertical bars of the grill door tend to resonate easily and may continue to vibrate for a significant time after playing has stopped. The resonance is intensified where the vertical bars are all of the same length, because they will all begin to resonate at the same frequency. Accordingly, it would be desirable for a musical instrument storage cabinet to utilize a door that decreases or eliminates the effect of resonance on the acoustical performance of a rehearsal room while still increasing the cubic volume of the room.
Even with a grill door, musical storage cabinets tend to reflect sound, which interferes with the acoustical performance of the room. One solution to this problem is to remove the back panel of the storage cabinet and push the cabinet against a sound-absorbing-panel that is located on a wall. This configuration allows more of the sound reaching the cabinet to be absorbed, rather than reflected. However, this technique is inefficient as separate purchases and installations must be made of the cabinet and the sound-absorbing panel. In addition, sound-absorbing panels are typically affixed to the wall, making relocation of the panels difficult and leaving marks behind in the wall if they are moved. Further, many rehearsal room are not big enough to accommodate wall-mounted sound-absorbing panels and musical storage cabinets. Accordingly, it would be desirable for there to be a simplified and more versatile way to provide sound absorption and musical instrument storage to a rehearsal room.